the harvest.

Hey everybody!

i've been spending the summer and recent weeks working with Pedro Allejandro and his dance group on some new projects. We did a performance at the arts and ideas festival in new haven over the summer, and another for a local community project that pedro is involved in fair haven. Yesterday we performed a new iteration of the piece at trinity college for the 40th anniversary of their dance department (pedro used to teach there before wes). i dont know if its an appropriate comparison but if it were a sports game, we won like whoa.... their pieces felt like a talent show, but they were all by seniors and faculty. also, way too much talking during the dance.....by the performers. poor show.


One of the ideas that we've been exploring is to break fully with the theatrical frame for the dance. doing this outside makes this easier, but i've been struggling with how to integrate my compositions without reinforcing some of the theatrical conventions, and without calling to mind the preconceptions that people approach a theatre with. My main problem right now is that where ever we play, i need a sound system, usually 2 speakers that draw a line across the performance space. I have found that when people encounter a speaker set up like this, they naturally stand on one side of it facing the speakers (makes sense, but sucks..). this is an issue for me, because i feel that it reintroduces a proscenium arch like frame for the dance, and gives the audience an artificial frame and reference point for the piece, which detracts from the work that pedro and the dancers have done to interact with the site in a sympathetic way.

i've been experimenting with a number of fixes for this problem, most recently, setting up a small pirate radio station to broadcast to tiny radios throughout the space (not beyond prototype due to budget freeze....;( .......) and giving the dancers these tiny cd players that they can carry and swing around and bump together (skip skip!), which do a great job of spacializing the sound and transposing the movement of the dancers to the soundscape, but are not loud enough..... (fuck wallmart. ... also an encounter with mad battery acid all up in my face. )

so i guess I'm writing because i'd love any feedback or ideas about this problem, but also because i've found trying to work full-time at 2 jobs is making it hard to work as much as i'd like, and I'm wondering how you all are doing on this front...... i'm finding that i my jobs make me choose between more than 3 hours sleep a night or working on my work............ shittty shitty shitty......

so, love to you all, and if you've figured this being alive thing out, please let me know asap./>


Ps>
here are some videos (shitty camera-phone quality) of our rehearsals on saturday.